Ivanka Trump’s West Wing Dilemma

Ivanka Trump delivers remarks at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on March 28, 2017 in Washington D.C.

By Win McNamee/Getty Images.

As a lifelong New Yorker, Ivanka Trump is still marveling at the fact that her three children have a backyard to play in. It’s been two and a half months since the First Daughter moved her family to Washington so that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, could advise her father, Donald Trump, as president. In that time, Kushner has amassed unprecedented power in the Trump administration, while Ivanka has taken an official position and an office of her own in the West Wing. The two have stepped down from the day-to-day operations of the companies they used to run and divested from hundreds of assets in order to serve in Washington. But sitting down midday Tuesday with CBS’s Gayle King in her sunny Kalorama rental, it was Ivanka’s backyard swing set that awed her.

“As a New Yorker, that doesn’t happen,” she laughed. What also doesn’t happen in New York? Monster truck shows. She had searched for one near New York to take her son Joseph to but came up empty until they moved to D.C. and found one in Baltimore. She’s taken her family to a museum or cultural institution each week. King told her fellow anchors that Ivanka and her daughter, Arabella, delivered cupcakes to their neighbors when they first moved to the area. Neighbors have complained about the disruption to their quiet neighborhood, the Secret Service presence, and the portable toilet outside their home. Even still, Ivanka called it a “nice community.”

“I really love living in D.C.,” she said. “I told Jared I want to treat it almost like I’m a visitor. . . . Every week I try to do something different, and we can really celebrate being in a different city and community.”

With her newfound affection for the nation’s capital, and her role within the White House cemented, King asked her if people should start taking their Ivanka 2024 signs out. “No,” she responded, without a beat. “Politics is a tough business.”

Video: Ivanka Trump, The First Daughter

That may be harder to believe, given that she gave that same unequivocal denial about joining her father’s administration. In November, when Lesley Stahl asked Ivanka during an interview on 60 Minutes about people musing that she would take on a role within the White House, she categorically denied it. “No,” she said. “I’m going to be a daughter.”

On Tuesday, Ivanka defended her initial denial to King in an interview that aired on CBS This Morning. “It was five or six days following the election, and I was processing the new reality and what it would mean,” she said. Since then, she said she realized she couldn’t have one foot in and one foot out and had to figure out how to move her family and divest their business interests and best serve her father.

Entering politics—a tough business, as she said—has brought even more heat on Ivanka. There are, of course, ethical issues with a First Daughter serving in the White House. There are legal issues, too, as to whether her new role violates anti-nepotism laws. And then there is the problem of trust. Ivanka had told the American people that she was simply going to be a daughter who advocated for a set of issues. Then she moved her family to Washington. Then she started sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders and calling her own meetings within the White House. Then came the news that she had her own office in the West Wing and was in the process of obtaining a security clearance. Through all of this, she contended that she was not going to be a federal employee but rather would remain an unofficial, close adviser.

Finally, last month, Ivanka announced that she was going to make it official. Her title in the White House is assistant to the president. Her office is on the second floor of the West Wing. It was a decision, she said, meant to appease those raising issues with her role. “I’m still my father’s daughter,” she told King. “To me, this particular title was about giving critics the comfort that I’m holding myself to the highest ethical standard. I’ll weigh in with my father on the issues I feel strongly about.”

But critics have been vocal about more than just the ethical standards, and she has faced blow back for not publicly speaking out about the issues for which she says she wants to advocate. When King asked her why she hasn’t spoken out more, Ivanka took issue with the premise. “It’s important not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence,” she said, explaining that there are “multiple ways to have your voice heard.” One would be taking to the streets or going on the nightly news. Another would be to do it “quietly and directly and candidly.”

“Where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor,” she added. Her calculation, it seems, is that it is far more effective for her to air her grievances in private.

“We’re in a very unique time where noise equals advocacy. I fundamentally disagree with that,” she said. “I do think there’s a time for public denouncement. I also think there’s a time for discussion. People who criticize me for not taking to social media on every single issue. I would ask them if it would render me more effective or less effective with the people who ultimately make the decision.”

When King pressed her to name something on which she disagreed with her father and she voiced her opinion, she demurred. “For me this isn’t about promoting my viewpoints. I wasn’t elected by the American people to be president,” she said. “I don’t think it’ll make me a more effective advocate to constantly articulate every issue publicly where we disagree.”

There is, perhaps, no one who understands how to manage Donald Trump better than Ivanka. If her determination is that she is best able to advocate for what she wants by doing so in private, that is a calculation based on her 35 years as his daughter and decade as his employee. She accepts that just because she voices her opinion, her father and boss won’t always agree or oblige. That’s something any child or any employee can relate to. What’s harder to understand, though, is moving to Washington and officially joining an administration that promotes policies that seem to fly in the face of many of her own ideals.

The word for that would be “complicit”—one that has been swirling around Ivanka and her relationship to her father for months, so much so that Saturday Night Live parodied her marketing a perfume by that name. But when King asked her about this, the First Daughter redefined her terms.

“If being complicit . . . is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit.”

That is not what complicit means, but that is a masterfully polished political answer for someone who, until now, has had no political experience. Don’t pack up those Ivanka 2024 signs just yet.

A ringletted, towheaded, toddler Tiffany Trump drew both of her parents’ attention in New York City.

Photo: By Catherine McGann/Getty Images.

Ivanka with her father at the Plaza hotel, 1991.

Photo: BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.

Ivanka with Donald at a Beach Boys concert in Palm Beach, 1996.

Photo: FROM DAVIDOFF STUDIOS/GETTY IMAGES.

A six-year-old Tiffany Trump, with a cherry-red flamenco dress and gold fan, stood for a portrait at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach in 1999.

Photo: by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.

Donald and Ivanka at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, 2016.

Photo: BY SUZANNE KREITER/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES.

Ivanka Trump and Tiffany trade whispers across their sister-in-law, Lara, in the audience at the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland.

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Tiffany Trump and Ivanka Trump outside the main doors of Donald Trump’s penthouse at Trump Tower, in Manhattan, 2014.

A ringletted, towheaded, toddler Tiffany Trump drew both of her parents’ attention in New York City.

By Catherine McGann/Getty Images.

Ivanka with her father at the Plaza hotel, 1991.

BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.

Ivanka with Donald at a Beach Boys concert in Palm Beach, 1996.

FROM DAVIDOFF STUDIOS/GETTY IMAGES.

A six-year-old Tiffany Trump, with a cherry-red flamenco dress and gold fan, stood for a portrait at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach in 1999.

by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.

Ivanka Trump, in a Canadian Tuxedo, spent Christmastime in Aspen with her father in 1990, where the two celebrated designer Dennis Bassos’s fur collection at the Little Nell.

From Getty Images.

A velvet-clad Ivanka Trump and her mother, Ivana, were all smiles on the Studio 54 dance floor.

by Ron Galella/WireImage.

The color-coordinated two sisters celebrate the season finale of their father’s hit reality show, The Apprentice.

By by Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic.

Tiffany on the runway during New York Fashion Week, 2016.

BY JACOPO RAULE/GETTY IMAGES.

Ivanka Trump joined her father and his then-girlfriend (and later, third wife), Melania, at the Met Ball in 2004. The annual gala’s theme that year: “Dangerous Liaisons.”

by Evan Agostini/Getty Images.

Tiffany Trump, her nearly invisible dress, and a friend posed for a selfie last summer at a benefit in the Hamptons.

From IZZY/WENN.com

Ivanka Trump gives her husband, Jared Kushner, a little squeeze after the White House Correspondence Dinner in 2012, four years before the couple set its sights on Washington.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

After her father clinched the win for the presidency on Nov. 8, Tiffany Trump gave her father a kiss on stage at the New York Hilton.

By SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.

Donald Trump patted his daughter’s baby bump at his victory rally in South Carolina, after he won the Republican primary in the state in February. Ivanka gave birth to her third child, Theodore, a month later.

By JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images.

Donald and Ivanka at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, 2016.

BY SUZANNE KREITER/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES.

Ivanka Trump and Tiffany trade whispers across their sister-in-law, Lara, in the audience at the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Tiffany Trump and Ivanka Trump outside the main doors of Donald Trump’s penthouse at Trump Tower, in Manhattan, 2014.